There aren’t a lot of musical comedies that can get away with rhyming “chick” with “Watson & Crick”—or “T ‘n’ A” with “DNA.” You don’t see many films that explore the romantic obstacles presented by prosopagnosia (face-blindness). And it’s a rare thing to witness young filmmakers getting some of the best story ideas they’ll ever hear from a Cal-Tech neuroscientist.

Of course, there aren’t that many occasions in Hollywood where What You Know actually trumps Who You Know.

The Sloan Film Summit, which ran from November 5 to 8 in Los Angeles, may have been anomalous in its surroundings; it certainly added a fascinating dimension to the recently concluded AFI Fest 2008. Bringing together funders from various Alfred P. Sloan Foundation programs, the American Film Institute Conservatory introduced grant winners to scientists, scientists to film professionals, film professionals to budding filmmakers and playwrights, in a kind of melding effort that mirrored the Sloan mission itself—the integration of an accurate and engaging portrayal of science in the popular arts.

“They can’t see it as ‘Here’s science’ and ‘Here’s fiction,’” said David Kirby, an evolutionary geneticist who lectures in science and communication at the University of Manchester. He was enlisted to moderate several Sloan Summit programs, involving present and would-be grantees. “It has to be about telling a story.”

Toward that end, Sloan award-winners presented work in several genres. Before the Moment, for instance, the musical referenced above, is by Jihan Crowther and Matt Schatz, and concerns DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. While it takes a light-hearted approach, and the libretto and lyrics are full of smart, punny lines, it also concerns Franklin’s quite serious dilemma of having to choose between a life of joy, and a life of achievement. And whether she ought to masquerade as a man in order to circumvent the sexism of her profession.

Before the Moment, commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan project, was just one of many works throughout the Sloan Summit in which ethics were of major concern. During the staged screenplay readings held at the Stella Adler Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, Sarah N_12, from NYU’s Sasie Sealy and Mark Heyman, explored crime via the virtual world’s Second Life. In Jay Burke’s Whaling City, a commercial fisherman working depleted waters considers a sideline in smuggling, and Madeleine Holly-Rosing’s Stargazer told the unlikely story of real-life Scottish immigrant Mina Fleming and her development into a world-class astronomer. As always throughout the Sloan Summit, the occasional need for poetic license was acknowledged, but so were the responsibilities of the dramatist who employs technology, biology, or psychology for the purposes of storytelling.

“My concerns are twofold: accuracy and quality,” said Dr. Paul Ekman, former professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, whose work is the inspiration for the Fox series, Lie to Me. Ekman’s forum was a panel discussion titled “From Geek to Chic: The Growing Popularity of Science in Prime-Time Television.”

“You don’t want to be misleading, dispensing information that would, for instance, sway juries,” Ekman said. “Or policemen. A lot of policemen get their version of science from TV.”

What the panelists weren’t opposed to was elevating the perception of the scientist in the minds of mass-media consumers, although as pointed out by Dr. Nicholas Warner, professor of physics, mathematics, and astronomy at USC, a big-screen presence doesn’t always enhance the romantic image of the brainiac.

“Not many people came out of A Beautiful Mind, saying ‘I want to be John Nash,’” Warner said.

But there’s an inherent attraction to the fictional scientist, said Nick Falacci, co-executive producer with wife Cheryl Heuton of the CBS series NUMB3RS—including the stereotypical “arrogant scientist.”

“He has powers,” Falacci said. “The powers of observation. The power of being right. He cuts through the clutter and provides observations no one else could make in those settings.”

“But being a scientist is a way of being; you can’t just graft him onto a script,” Warner cautioned. “Don’t eviscerate your scientists by forcing them to do things they wouldn’t do.”

How to avoid that pitfall was the subject not just of “From Geek to Chic” but of a sister panel, “We Told You So: Scientific Disasters in Film as Entertainment or Cautionary Tale,” which was moderated by Kirby, author of the upcoming Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science’s Impact on Cinema, Cinema’s Impact on Science. The panel included Flash of Genius director Mark Abraham, whose film, starring Greg Kinnear, concerns the struggles of Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Kearns battled Detroit for years to be recognized for his stolen invention. But while Kearns’ scientific gifts and the invention itself played a part in the story, character and narrative were of far greater importance to Abraham.

“We honored him as an engineer and for his ideas, but he did grapple with moral issues,” Abraham said, the point being that dramatic propulsion is the objective—but that getting the science right only helps that cause. “You want to give the actor the confidence to believe.”

Abraham has produced any number of films in which technology was either central or tangential—including Air Force One, Dawn of the Dead, End of Days, and most recently Children of Men, about a world in which humans have ceased to reproduce. Based on the P.D. James novel, it was adapted by Abraham’s Sloan Summit co-panelist, Timothy J. Sexton, offered some insights about converting science into entertainment.

Such narratives “are hardly ever about the technology. Or they’re about how the technology cannot save us,” Sexton said. “But every technological advance that solves a problem creates a new problem. So [for storytelling] there are great possibilities.”

Some of those possibilities were laid out by Moran Surf, a neuroscientist currently conducting research at the California Institute of Technology into the definition of consciousness. He more or less told the filmmakers in the audience to listen up before giving them a list of the 10 best new, unexplored, and recently researched areas that could provide the basis for a movie plot.

And he added that he hoped to see some of them on screen soon.

They included the science of consciousness; the chemical basis for love and happiness; advances on a unified field theory (”the theory of everything”); ethics and animal research; and what Surf explained were “one-off” or singular cases of neurological disorder: a patient he knew of, for instance, who couldn’t experience fear.

“I can’t publish a paper about them,” Surf said. “They’re singular cases; they don’t represent anything larger. But their stories should be made into movies.”

Not that those science movies always do so well—as the panelists pointed out, even 2001: A Space Odyssey found no safe harbor at the box office, not initially; Children of Men fared little better; likewise, Flash of Genius.

But this seems unlikely to stop filmmakers like NYU grad Dara Bratt, whose short film In Vivid Detail seemed the perfect synthesis of Sloan ideals: an engaging story hinging on—but neither subordinate to, nor eclipsed by—scientific information.

In it, Leslie (Piper Perabo), a new employee at an architecture firm sparks romantically with Justin (John Ventigmilia), who suffers from prosopagnosia—an inability to recognize or process faces. The result of frontal-lobe damage, Justin’s disorder doesn’t just affect his social skills, it rocks Leslie’s world a little bit too: if Justin doesn’t respond to her face, how is she going to be interpreted by him? What’s her identity? And, as Bratt put it, “How is beauty measured?”

Bratt said she got the idea from a friend who was studying prosopagnosia at Harvard, and she credited NYU with stressing the amalgamation of science and narrative, the idea that the neurological disorder “weave through the story and not be made into some expository paragraph. And I felt a responsibility to portray it accurately.”

She said she “wasn’t a science kid,” but has suffered from insomnia and has long been intrigued by questions like “How do we fall asleep?” She was also inspired by portrait artists who work the streets of her hometown, Montreal, which gave her the idea, incorporated into her film, about breaking a face down onto a grid—on architect’s paper, for example—thus making the mysterious whole understandable in parts, to someone like Justin.

Bratt applied for a Sloan grant through the NYU/Sloan partnership (she said she’ll seek funding for her feature through the Tribeca, Sundance, and Hamptons). She found out she’d won while working a seemingly unlikely job: assistant director on Cheaper by the Dozen 2, while it was shooting in Toronto.

“Piper Perabo appeared in the film,” Bratt said, “and I wouldn’t have dared approach her. It was a professional relationship. But a friend who had the script gave it to her.”

After some nerve-wracking weeks, Perabo agreed to do the film, which was shot largely in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. Ventigmilia came aboard thanks to Perabo.

And the Sloan Summit? “I loved it,” Bratt said, of an event that brought newcomers like herself together with grizzled veterans of the film world, some of whom have been Sloan awardees. “Werner Herzog saw my film!”

For other reports on the Sloan Film Summit 2008, read Eli Akira Kaufman’s post on the Film Independent blog and Roxanne Benjamin’s post on the AFI Fest blog.

Although it’s set in a future where people connect to the Internet through nodes implanted in their flesh, the world of Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer is remarkably similar to the present. The border between the U.S. and Mexico is sealed, but Mexican workers can cross over virtually with the help of a “coyotek,” a back-alley surgeon who implants the costly nodes at cut-rate prices. Privatized water, already a reality in parts of Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, has made its way to southern Mexico, where struggling campesinos pay top-dollar to irrigate their tiny patches of land.

Inspired as much by Bicycle Thieves as Blade Runner, director Alex Rivera and co-writer David Riker set out to create a plausible vision of the future while keeping a safe distance from contemporary political debates. But as they worked on the script over a period of several years, they found that reality kept catching up to them. “We would joke that we set out to write a science-fiction film, but by the time we were done, it was a period piece,” Riker says.

Sleep Dealer, which took Sundance’s screenwriting award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for science-oriented films, follows Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a bulky country boy, from his family’s rural village to the big city of Tijuana, where he finds work in one of the human factories that have replaced the industrial economy. In these “sleep dealers,” so called (in English) for the exhaustion they mete out, node workers connect their nervous systems to robotic machinery on the other side of the border, exporting their labor without moving their bodies.

A guileless stranger in a strange and unforgiving land, Memo is taken in by Luz (Leonor Varela), a struggling writer who makes ends meet by selling her memories on the web. Business has been slow, but she acquires a loyal customer in Rudy (Jacob Vargas), an American drone pilot who stages long-distance air raids from a San Diego skyscraper. Rudy is used to following orders and not questioning his targets, but when he discovers that the “terrorist” he incinerated was Memo’s father, the consequences of waging virtual war begin to weigh on him. The technology that has isolated the movie’s characters begins to bring them together, erasing the boundaries it once enhanced.

Rivera began working with the ideas behind Sleep Dealer in the mid-1990s, inspired by the confluence of economic liberalism and cultural xenophobia. He points out that 1994, the year that NAFTA dissolved the trade barriers between the U.S. and Mexico, was the same year that the U.S. began Operation Guardian, whose anti-immigration measures included the beginnings of the border wall. “If we live in a world where businesses can travel freely across borders and build factories wherever they want, but then walls are put up so the workers can’t move, the picture isn’t pretty,” Rivera says. “It’s like there’s one type of freedom that’s being celebrated, and another that’s being taken away.”

From the beginning, Rivera has been fascinated by border crossings. Papapapa, produced when he was a political-science major at free-form Hampshire College, retraces his father’s immigration from Peru, and his 2003 documentary The Sixth Section explores the bonds between a group of immigrants in Newburgh, New York, and their hometown of Boquerón, Mexico, two communities that function as one despite the thousands of miles between them.

Raised by his Peruvian father and his mother, a native of New Jersey, in upstate New York, Rivera says his childhood inspired his lifelong interest in cultural overlap. “On one floor, my mom would be watching Days of Our Lives, and on another floor, my dad would be watching Dos Mujeres, un Camino on Telemundo, so my house was cross-border just from one room to the next,” he recalls. “It’s sort of an absurd place to grow up.”

Rivera’s culture-clash upbringing expresses itself in the hybrid texture of his films. Sleep Dealer’s futuristic tableaux are bathed in incandescent pinks and greens, and Rudy’s bombing missions are realized with a heavy dose of computer animation. But the scenes where Memo and his father tend to their patch of beans and corn could come straight out of Salt of the Earth.

“A lot of people that are interested in political films or making films on social issues are very committed to a documentary form,” Rivera says. “Through all my work, I’ve been trying to play with the form, mix in animation, mix in a sense of humor, mix in an element of surreality, in order to talk about this, at times, very violent, very intense, very absurd reality that we live in.” (Rivera’s fondness for mashups is also expressed in a weakness for puns: virtual workers are “cybraceros,” while a sign in a dive bar offers access to “Live Node Girls.”)

The mixture of science fiction and social realism has a political component as well. “We felt that most science-fiction films have ignored the question of unequal social development,” Riker says. “They presuppose, whether you’re watching Minority Report or Blade Runner, that the new gadgets and flying vehicles exist all over the planet. But we see that history is not that way, that quote-unquote modernity has never been distributed equally.” In Sleep Dealer, “the idea is that one part of the world is living in science fiction, and the other part is living the way it has for hundreds of years.”

Riker’s 1998 film La Ciudad was a neorealist chronicle of the lives of Spanish-language migrant workers in New York City, but he has been living in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the last three and a half years, where he has experienced the onset of Sleep Dealer’s water crisis firsthand. Like many components of the movie’s speculative future, the corporate control of southern Mexico’s water supply is only a slight interpolation from the world of today. The “aqua-terrorists” accused of sabotaging the water conglomerates’ operations were inspired by the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, who successfully protested Bechtel’s control of their municipal water supply. The virtual labor of the sleep dealers is merely a physical analogue to the Indian workers who staff call centers and read X-rays in Bangalore and Hyberabad. Neural interfaces of the kind Sleep Dealer envisions are still a ways off, but scientists have succeeded in connecting computers to the brains of paralyzed patients, allowing them to control the device with their minds.

“People who knew about the script would email us articles as the script started to come true,” Rivera says. “A lot of the predictions that the movie puts forward, 10 years ago they were political satire. It’s been fascinating watching the world catch up with my absurd nightmare scenario.”

Mixing present and future, realism and speculation, Sleep Dealer embodies what Chicano artists call rasquachismo, a kitchen-sink aesthetic in which objects are thrown together without regard for their intended use. “I, and millions of other people like me, live in a kind of hybrid cultural space,” Rivera says, “a little tiny slice of America that has no border, that speaks both languages, that looks at the world from a point of view that’s from the South and from the North. Sleep Dealer tries to do that.”

James Sandlin Ashby was awarded a Screenwriting grant at Carnegie Mellon in 2008 for Boltzmann’s Demon

Eleanor Burke was awarded a Production grant at NYU in 2006 for Kadya

Edgar Mendoza was awarded a Screenwriting grant at Carnegie Mellon in 2008 for The Unifying Theory

Lauren Gunderson was awarded a Screenwriting grant at NYU in 2008 for Grand Unification

Robert Cohen was awarded a Screenwriting grant at NYU in 2008 for Prisoner’s Dilemma

Alexander Davidson was awarded a Screenwriting grant at NYU in 2008 for On the Twilight of Tomorrow

Joseph Singer was awarded a Production grant at NYU in 2007 for Stereopsis

Aimee Gillette was awarded a Production grant at NYU in 2007 for Ram Bambit